Social bookmarking has become very popular in the 2000's. If you aren't familiar with the term, social bookmarking is bookmarking websites online rather than just to your browser. Saving them online allows to gather all of your bookmarks in one place where you can join communities revolving around common interest, search using other people's saved bookmarks and tags, and have access to them in your browser by integrating your online saves with extensions. Some social bookmarking services are Digg, StumbleUpon, and Reddit. Social bookmarking started in 1996 with itList, and it grew from there. In the early 2000's all of the initial Social bookmarking sites were gone, victims of the dot-com bubble bursting.
Then came Delicious (originally named del.icio.us) in 2003. Delicious revolutionized the concept of social bookmarking by initiating 'tagging', which is simply put as giving one word descriptors of what the site relates to. By encouraging members to tag sites, Delicious was able to create easy ways to search every members public bookmarks to find sites easier that other people had found particularly useful. You could follow other users, which would allow you know when they added something new. Delicious coined the term social bookmarking, in fact.
Today, it was leaked that Yahoo is going to be closing down Delicious, and the users are upset, to say the least. If you were a Delicious user, or have jut been introduced to the concept of social bookmarking and want to try it out, there are a number of website communities that you can choose from.
The most popular social bookmarking site at the moment is StumbleUpon. StumbleUpon has a large community base, an easy add process, and the feature that really stands out and makes it popular is its Stumble. StumbleUpon has a toolbar that you can install to your browser that will let you pick topics and categories you're interested in, and then 'stumble'. That means that the website uses other 'stumblers' tagged sites to send you to random sites that have been Liked by other users. This is a great way to inadvertently kill several hours of your spare time, and opens people to sites they may never have found any other way. December of 2009 had StumbleUpon claiming to have more than 8,772,000 users.
Digg is another option that is popular. Digg uses the terminology digging and burying to move websites up and down in popularity and usefulness. One of the nice features of Digg is that you can rate a page without ever actually being directed to a different page. 2010 has seen significant changes to the website, and in August of 2010 a new version was released. The new version disappointed the users and resulted in loss of activity and a change of CEOs.
Slashdot is popular with a certain crowd, that primarily being nerds and geeks. Slashdot offers not only a feed of recently submitted stories, but also user moderator discussions for those stories. Slashdot has a rather interesting history, as geek specific things often do, including the founder's proposal to his girlfriend on the front page in 2002 and pranksters sending people to Goatse.cx for fun. The forums associated with Slashdot are interesting reading and a selling point for people interested in technology. Slashdot uses tags, like other social bookmarking sites, and has an extremely active community.
While many people include Twitter in social bookmarking, it's isn't exactly the same. While bookmarks are common in Tweets, it isn't easy to scroll back through Twitter history and find where you Tweeted a site, much less someone else's Tweets.
Social bookmarking is a great tool that is still climbing in popularity. If you haven't looked into it before, now is a great time. And to the users of Delicious, hope to see you around.
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